[UK-CONTEST] cqwwwpx

[Olof Lundberg]

M5E made another attempt for the second year in WPX.

M5E SOSB 40 LP(A) raw scores as submitted:

2010: 1061 qsos, 579 prefixes, 1.69 Mpoints (this became 1048-571-1.62 after
CQ's log-checking)
2011: 1034 qsos, 643 prefixes, 1.84 Mpoints

I live in a suburban location and do not have any permanent antennas in the
air. Every contest involves a bit of field day or dx-pedition travails. The
rear garden is well screened from the rest of the world by houses in every
direction and a dense jungle of shrubs and trees.

For 40 I have played with loops, inverted vees and verticals. My present
favorite is a vertical in the middle of my rear lawn. This year I used a 40
ft solid glass-fibre pole as the support for a vertical with elevated
radials. An extension and a cap hat on top raised the current max on the
vertical as much as was doable with the means at hand. The theory is of
course that a bit more RF would escape above the surrounding screens. The
radio is a K3 which has a truly wonderful receiver for CW. WinTest was doing
the logging and it is superb at that.

Contesting is and should be fun. I did half-serious contesting back in the
1960s pre-family and pre-career as SM6CKV and SK6AB and with other calls.
This was big-station stuff. In the last few years I have slowly been getting
back into the hobby. Earlier this year I did ARRL CW as M/2 from one of the
big stations in OH-land. That was fun but would have been even more fun if
the sun had cooperated and the polar absorption hadn't raised its ugly cap.
A couple of weeks later I joined another M/2 team at a big W6 mountain-top
location and that was good fun too.

Operating from a suburban location with low power and wet strings is
different. It is certainly more challenging but also [me thinks, your
mileage may vary] very satisfying. You don't really need a superstation to
do OK and have fun. You don't have to worry about keeping your run frequency
because you won't - it would be a time-waster so it is better to walk away
with a smile when the bullies step on you. You stay away from the big
pile-ups where the button-pushing cluster slaves who couldn't afford a
receiver when they had bought the power amplifier are making a mess of it.
You have to use your brain because you will not succeed in a brawl.

The first night started well. Two hours into the contest I had bagged 150
qsos through old-fashioned non-assisted s&p. It seemed that most everyone
was busy trying to run so my serial number compared very favorably to the
big-gun runners at that time. This may be a particular feature of WPX which
is pretty democratic in terms of multipliers; almost every participant is a
multiplier so you don't need to be in a rare dx location and you won't see
the associated pile-ups. After the first night I was well ahead of my score
from last year but my head felt in need of a pillow.

You would do better in any contest if you think and plan ahead. I didn't. So
I woke up and got back to the band midday on Saturday. The only decent
signal on the band was DR1A. I tried to run and struggled to extract a few
weak callers from the noise. Attenuation was dreadful. I repeated this on
Sunday. In a particularly slooow period my friendly neighbor G3TXF called in
and out of six other qsos 3 were gratefully logged dupes. ON6LY called me
and gave me serial number 001 and that cheered me up as I was sitting there
feeling lonely. I suspect ON6LY will be a unique but I have the recording to
prove that it wasn't a hallucination.

The band didn't die after the first night but it was in poor shape. I could
work all I heard in the Caribbean and South America but Asia was a different
story. I wasted too much time calling JAs and BYs who had reasonably good
signals here but who pretended that I didn't exist. I did work one BY, YE1C
and one VK though. Solar flux was increasing during the weekend but there
were also magnetic disturbances which may account for the miserable condx
after the first night

I guess I qualify as an oldtimer (aren't we almost all nowadays?) and I am
very happy operating without assistance. I hate the DX cluster. No, let me
correct that, I like the technology but I despair about the operating habits
that the cluster seems to have fed. The Skimmers and the RBN probably will
bring its own problems but right now it is like a fresh breeze of innovation
and relief from the cluster stuff. My experience is that the RBN adds to the
fun factor. In this contest I didn't have time to even switch it on the
first few hours but then it helped keeping the interest and activity up. On
Sunday I had worked most of the eternal runners so by then the RBN gave the
appearance of providing plenty of false spots but that was simply because
more or less everything real had been worked. What remains to be worked can
only be reached by running.

There are some interesting prefixes out there nowadays. I proudly logged
OM2011IIMF, DR11BUGA, DA2MORSE, LZ855SRKM, OM75IHWC, PC65ISWL and more of
the same. I seem to have missed UB5ASHORTHISTORYOFTRACTORSINUKRAINE.

It is tempting to stir further in the discussion about rules but I shall
refrain except to say that a) I have this old-fashioned belief that our
society is better off if rules and laws are adhered to; b) there will never
be any absolute fairness in radio contesting at the global or macro level
(but WRTC2010 got as close as it could); c) contesting should rather be
about fun and enjoyment and self-improvement; d) amateur radio is a
technology-based hobby that needs to continue to evolve with the times and
if we don't allow that the hobby will die.

Darwin, the chap who invented evolution, knew that a long time ago.

Next up: CW NFD with the local club as G3UES/P

73 de Olof G0CKV M5E